Imagine a food processor that only relies on local ingredients, and just a couple of suppliers. A company that is not impacted by any legislation or onerous customer obligations. I know – it’s hard to imagine, because this is as far as fiction can get. Every food company is incredibly connected through the supply chain, regulatory and compliance requirements, consultants and contractors, and of course customers. Fewer and fewer food companies are able to run their business locally, and instead they need to source products from everywhere in the world, hire staff from various backgrounds, and sell their products to foreign markets.

Fragmentation of IT solutions is a massive risk for food companies

All of this complexity needs to be managed somehow, but finding a suitable solution is not easy. A typical food safety team will be working with multiple stakeholders: suppliers, certification bodies, retailers, regulatory agencies, audit teams, consultants, service providers – such as food safety laboratories – and customers. Keeping track of all the necessary changes, maintaining dialogue, and doing away with the daily tasks becomes a major challenge unless we have some kind of solution to address all these needs.

Managing all this complexity involves working with many parties simultaneously, and herein lies a great risk for the food industry.

As all the different actors within the food company struggle to come up with solutions to their daily problems, we are likely to see a great fragmentation in the IT environment. The maintenance staff will have their own little solution, quality another, and the audit team will have something else in place. Production line has a separate system, and the managers have their own thing of course. Managing, purchasing, updating and training become a massive cost and burden in such a disjointed environment.

Avoiding this fragmentation is only one of the reasons why we at Safefood 360° believe that technological solutions should be complete, and that each bit of the technology application should freely interact with the other. We’ve wanted to build a single platform for all stakeholders in the food safety ecosystem to collaborate on and exchange information in real time. That’s why our motto is “Brings it all together”.

You only need one account

People have multiple roles: You might be a mother, a big sister, a good friend and a partner at the same time. It’s natural for people to play multiple roles, and the same applies to companies. Your company might be a producer, a contractor, and an investor at the same time, which means you deal with different stakeholders depending on your role.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your business could serve in all these different roles with the same ease that you switch between roles in your personal life?
Your access to the entire food safety ecosystem should be easy. Just like having a Google account gives you access to email, calendar, office software, and all the other parts of the Google empire – we’ve wanted to create a platform for food safety professionals where you can access all the relevant pieces of the ecosystem with just one account. One food company might be a user of Safefood 360° in their core operations but also maintain a supplier relationship to another – with Safefood 360° the company is able to achieve both tasks through accessing different parts of the same software. This way you avoid investing in multiple solutions, and above all, you reduce complexity. We’ve gone to extreme lengths in our development to make this as intuitive as possible.

The same applies to auditors and certification bodies. An auditing company might be interacting with hundreds of clients in the course of the year, but only need one account to access them on our platform. If these clients happen to be existing Safefood 360° users, all notes and corrective actions that come about during an audit will be automatically available in their user account.

Our vision for one platform

Our vision is to build one platform for food safety management, where all necessary stakeholders can easily collaborate and exchange information. One platform will overcome most of the challenges posed by increasing demands and complexity, and will allow one company to participate in the supply chain in multiple roles without having to invest in separate solutions. We’ve invested countless hours in development to overcome all these challenges so that our users can simply enjoy their daily work and focus on making a safer product.

What do you think? Do you like the idea of one, integrated platform through which you can accomplish all your food safety work?